With the advent of high-speed internet connections and streaming video technology, transmission of rich media material is becoming more and more frequent on the world wide web. Short length videos can now be quickly downloaded and viewed on nearly all recently purchased home computers with high-speed connections.
Due to their short lengths and high production values, television commercials represent ideal existing material for streaming on the internet. They also represent an important and valuable source of content: many are entertaining, most carry worthy information for the prospective buyer of a the product or service and all represent important data for the advertising industry professional in constant need of monitoring the advertising activities of the competition.
Systems have been developed to remove advertising segments from real time television transmissions. See for example U.S. Pat. No. 5,999,689 (Iggulden) and U.S. Pat. No. 6,002,443 (Iggulden).
On another hand, following the internet driven trend of on demand content, many concepts and technologies such as interactive television, on demand television programming, and hard disk television program recording technologies are rapidly evolving to give the consumer the ability to watch what he wants, when he wants it (see for example U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,532,735 and 5,481,542).
Hard disk program recording technologies linked with an internet service such as TiVo and Web TV, for instance, give the television viewer the opportunity to fast forward past the advertising blocks of the recorded material and therefore watch only the material he or she wishes to watch. None though actually extract the advertising blocks from the standard aired material.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,864,823 (Levitan) describes a commercial-on-demand system which requires the use specially coded commercials in conjunction with a computer linked to the internet and to the television signal receiver.